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If I were making music in the style of someone who died six years before I was born, people would probably think I was out of style. I'm not sure if this is the historical fallacy I don't have a name for, where we gloss over differences in a few decades because they're less salient to us than the differences between the 1990s and the 1960s, or if musical styles just change more quickly now.
It seems that the pace of change in music waxes and wanes, and does not seem to be accelerating. The twenty year gap from 1955 to 1975 is enormous. From 1995 to 2015, not so much.
In response to
Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping
That was a wonderfully clear introduction! I'd definitely want to see more posts on sleep since I think it's one of the most important, if not the most important aspect of optimizing cognitive performance.
I second Mirzhan_Irkegulov's disinterest in polyphasic sleep though, at least until several lower hanging fruits have been picked. Polyphasic sleep is likely to be excessively difficult to maintain by most people, even if it were a viable alternative. Since sleep is enormously important as you stated and likely interesting as it is to many people, your posts will have a greater positive impact if you explore the less niche venues first.
Most people in society follow the same sleeping patterns so I can't see why disabling circadian control at will would be extremely useful unless you do shift work or have to socialize at nights. Could expand on that? I think it's much easier to not get sleep deprived in the first place. Problems of shift work are increasingly mitigated by the internet as work is computerized and thus can be done by people on the sunny side of the planet while you sleep.
Suggestions for subtopics based on my personal interest
- alcohol, nicotine, caffeine
- exercise and its timing, nutrition and its timing
- chronological age
- optimizing artificial lighting and the bedroom
- z-drugs and their dangers
- melatonin, mirtazapine, mianserin, quetiapine
- stress, depression, anxiety
- effects of antidepressants on sleep structure
If you need help with article paywalls PM me and I'll see what I can do.
Another interesting topic would be the effect of body temperature on sleep latency and/or quality (or possibly temperature of selected body parts--there is some buzz about the so-called "cooling cap" for insomnia lately, for example).
To me it seems a big breakthrough for being able to trim sleep time down substantially would be some technology that allowed a person to pass through the lighter stages of NREM sleep more quickly so that you could spend the majority of sleep time in slow wave.
In response to
Solving sleep: just a toe-dipping
First a plug for the best Sleep text by far, "Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine", by Kryger, Roth, and Dement. If you don't have this, you need it.
To turn off the circadian alerting, it would suffice to suppress cortisol.
I would think that there is plenty of low hanging fruit to exploit before that though. After well known sleep hygiene measures have been addressed, and pathologies excluded, the largest remaining drain on sleep quality is maladaptive emotional processing. See Barry Krakow's "Sound Sleep, Sound Mind" for lots of detail on this. This book is rather unusual in making a big deal of the link between poor emotional processing and poor sleep quality, but dude is a very highly regarded sleep specialist who had been running a top-notch sleep clinic for many, many years, and not to be pooh-poohed lightly.
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No. People have partial information and there are some who will have beliefs, experiences, or data which makes it rational for them to believe and also irrational reasons; additional rational reasons should push a few people over the edge of the decision if rational reasons play any meaningful role in non-adopters. (If you want to mathematicize it, imagine it as a liability-threshold model.)
Also no. I think you are not understanding my argument. Because all the new evidence is one-sided, we know the direction people should update in regardless of initial proportions of irrationality of either side. In the same way, we don't know for sure how irrational it was to believe in mind-body dualism in 1500 but we do know that all the evidence that has come in since has been decisively in favor of materialism, and if we saw a group which had the same rate of mind-body dualism in 2016 as 1500, we could be certain that they were deeply irrational on that topic. The absence of any change in the large initial fraction of non-adopters in response to all the new evidence over a long time period implies their judgement is far more driven by irrational reasons than adopters. (By definition everyone is either a adopter or non-adopter, no change in non-adopters implies no change in adopters.)
I have the sense that there's something wrong with this division into "adopters" and "non-adopters". The lack of increase in cryonics-adopters while pro-cryonics evidence has been coming in does not mean that there is one group that updates their cryonics decisions rationally (the adopters) and one group that does not (the non-adopters). If that were the case then there would be an increase, as the rational ones gradually got on board as evidence came in. The stasis in the adoption curve wouldn't just mean that the current non-adopters are irrational for not getting on board, it would also mean that the adopters were irrational for getting on board too soon, before the good evidence came in. Unless we want to say that from the get-go the pro-cryonics case was super strong.